In writing, there are no absolutes. So what I’m advocating today may not be a path you wish to walk, for whatever reasons, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. And that’s having another job besides writing.
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In order to understand my motivation, you may need to understand my background. In brief, I grew up VERY poor. I can remember being delighted that I made $9000 in grad school, and it was all for me! I paid for my own college education with scholarships and loans. I knew that there were no parents to bail me out should I run into any financial difficulty, ever. Hell’s bells, my parents, paragons of virtue that they were, tried to suck down my first summer college savings because I was more financially responsible than them.
Given that I’ve done the whole poverty thing, and really didn’t enjoy it much, one thing I wanted in my adult life was to have a stable job. I wanted to be a writer too, but you see how those two things just don’t mix. So, my strategy was to find a job where I would have some time off to write. I fell in love with teaching during my MA, and my thinking was to get a high school teaching job once my husband moved us to deepest, darkest Western Iowa. My mistake? There is no real time to write. After school gets sewn up with extracurricular activities, and to produce an entire book in a summer after an intense school year didn’t work out.
I decided to return to college education. I didn’t do much writing when I worked on my doctorate, but I kept my eye on the prize, maneuvering myself into a position where I would have time to write. I did this, receiving my Kirkwood position in 1998. I finished my dissertation in 2001. My job didn’t get to where I could write well until 2007, and then I started my writer education.
The flaw of my plan is that I’ve had to forestall satisfaction until I made it to a particular spot. I had to get my job set up so that there was time to write. I do have a job that’s very receptive to it, but you could definitely argue that waiting until the age of 42 to get serious about writing, when you’ve wanted to do it all your life, is a real drawback. Yet, I would counsel would be writers to have a career. Here’s why. Again, these are my reasons, and individuals might see things differently. I am not eschewing these as absolute truths.
1. Writing is not a steady job. There is no stream of steady revenue. You should liken it to starting your own business. It might take a while to catch on. You might succeed. You might also fail. Relying on writing for income, especially early on, is a great way to be very, very poor.
2. Having a job gets you out of the house. Getting out of the house means you see people and have experiences to write about. It also keeps those very important social skills in shape. I suspect that a lot of the many SFWA kerfluffles might have resulted from people who do not have the greatest of social skills, which might be better, if they had to interact with people more.
3. Having a job helps me preserve my self worth. I get rejected in writing a lot. And I know, based on feedback from workshops and rejections, that I’m almost there, but I’m still getting rejected. I don’t build my self worth around acceptance, but on the other hand, it is nice to have an arena in my life where I am accepted, praised for my worth, and overall get positive feedback for what you do. It takes a long time to get there in writing, and even then, there will still be rejections.
4. Having a job means I can support myself. I can pay for my own conventions and retreats and vacations, when I want to go. I have health insurance. I have retirement. No one in life can see the future, and I know of cases recently, like Stan Sakai and his wife, where they made all the right moves, and are medically poor, but I have managed the risk as best as I can by having a job. With luck, I won’t be that person who’s asking you for money to go to the Nebulas. (Actually, I’d probably just not go to the Nebulas if I didn’t have money, even if I were nominated. Having been poor teaches you to learn to live within your means, whatever decisions you’ve made.) But what I’m saying is this: money is a good thing. The coin I lack is time, and time to write might be more valuable to you than filthy lucre. I’m not good enough managing my money to not have some coming in, and I rely on myself, largely because of my inability to control my circumstances in the past.
5. Working gives me some way to spend my life just in case I don’t publish. Even though I am a good writer, so are many of you. And even though this is not a zero sum game, I know that there is a possibility that I may not publish. Let’s see…hard work. Check. Talent. Check. Luck? Hello? Luck? Not everyone who wants to make it makes it, or you might make it only so far. Is it possible that Hulk Hercules could be the pinnacle of my career? Yes. Through no fault of my own? Yes. Is that fair? Doesn’t matter. Working is a way to have a life, instead of waiting for my life to happen.
6. A career can give you opportunities. In my case, frequent trips to Japan. One trip to Viet Nam. One trip to Russia. Lots and lots of interactions with brilliant, worthwhile students and teachers. People who are multi-faceted, and make me think interesting things, which lead to interesting story ideas. You probably don’t get the travel opportunities with a waitress job, I’ll admit. But I doubt that for me writing is going to get me many places. For some more well-known writers? Well, sure.
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I guess what I’m trying to say is this: I can’t rely on writing in the same way I can teaching. I know that getting my career in shape took 42 years. Perhaps if I’d been spending all that time writing, I could be somewhere now, but I couldn’t do it for so many reasons, some good and some bad. Pragmatism, pride, intellectual snobbery, insatiable curiosity, relationships, happiness and just plain not wanting to spend all of my life doing one thing. I just don’t know about the writing, and I just don’t care. I want a happy life. Writing is part of that life, but publication? Who knows? And once that happens? Failure? Success? Who knows.
So, I’d best wrap this up and go write today. Because it makes me feel good, in part, because I’m not relying on it to pay the rent.
